Python officials intend to remove the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) from the language, speeding up concurrent code – and said they will be careful with backward compatibility to avoid “another Python 3 situation.” More here by timanderson over d3vclass
that it intends to accept the proposal, following a poll of the core development team with two questions: were members in favor of making Python free-threaded, and were they willing to accept the cost “in terms of complexity and maintenance.” The votes were 87% in support of the first, and 63% in support of the second, despite the comment in the poll that “We don’t know how much code implicitly relies on the GIL, or is thread-unsafe in subtle ways that are masked by the GIL.
The Steering Council though is wary of the implications and keen to avoid a repeat of the painful progression from Python 2 to Python 3, where lack of compatibility delayed the upgrade for many users. “This is not Python 4,” said the post from core developer Thomas Wouters, posting for the whole Steering Council.
The intent is to progress the proposal in three stages. The first is to add no-GIL as an experimental build, to enable the community to try it. Next, the no-GIL build would become supported, but not the default, for a period of “at least a year or two, possibly more.” Third, the teams wants no-GIL to be the default and “to remove any vestiges of the GIL”.
Gross has been promoting the notion of a no-GIL CPython for some time, and spoke on the subject at the EuroPython event in July 2022, where he said he had been working on the project for the “past few years.” The GIL, he, “ensures that only one thread can execute Python code at a time.” It was introduced in 1992 to enable multi-threaded coding in Python subject to the constraints of the GIL, which made such code safer and easier to implement.
The rationale is compelling; but the compatibility issues are also real, and it seems that the Steering Council is keenly aware of both aspects.
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